Technology Used

What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you or did you seek to develop?

From early on in conversations with IAG professionals, it became clear that a purely electronic approach to IAG is not an ideal solution. What the project sought to achieve was provision of a tool that could be used as part of a blended approach, empowering learners to access resources that had been quality assured by IAG staff and use them as part of a structured decision-making process which could then maximise the effectiveness of face-to-face interactions, on which there is so much time pressure.

The project looked to repurpose existing technology where possible. The project began by building a module that could be coupled with the Passportfolio system, but the intention was always that the JOSEPH tool itself could, with minimal further work, be linked to other e-portfolio systems and web services, increasing its flexibility and further potential.

The current stand-alone module, developed in .NET, has scope to be included in a broader ecosystem linking e-portfolio, IAG, course discovery and application via a common application form and FE MIS systems.

The tool could also be developed stand alone as a SCORM learning object, or the prompts themselves exported in the QTI (Question Test Interoperability) standard for inclusion in a VLE.

The tool is able to take a feed from the Nottinghamshire 14-19 online prospectus to allow the user to live search course information in the area; with minimal further work this could incorporate other XCRI feeds.